A gaming zone, such as the Microsoft Internet Gaming Zone, is an online gaming website on the Internet to which users connect in order to find other Internet users for playing an online computer game therewith. Many contemporary online computer games operate over a peer-to-peer network protocol, in which game play is via communication between the users' computers rather than via a centralized datacenter. With a peer-to-peer network protocol, a user's computer is thus communicating with every other users' computer in the game.
A significant problem for gaming zone players of peer-to-peer games is that the amount of time it takes for a piece of data to travel from one computer over a network to another computer, known as latency, can be highly variable across users. For example, computer connections to the Internet may vary among users from slow, dial-up 28.8 kbps modems to high-speed T1 and T3 connections, with any number of machines routing packets in between. This can result in latencies from fifty milliseconds to greater than one second. When a user with high or inconsistent latency participates in an online game, the game will often slow down, periodically pause, or fail to last to completion, resulting in user frustration and a less than satisfactory gaming experience.
In contrast to peer-to-peer games, when a user is contemplating playing a game via a centralized datacenter, the user is able to look at a predicted latency value, which can be easily determined by measuring the amount of time it takes for data to be returned from the centralized datacenter. The user can decide whether to play the game based on the predicted latency. Analogously, to accurately predict the gaming experience in a peer-to-peer game, each player would need to know the latency of each other player that is going to be involved in the game. However, in a peer-to-peer game, the number of users concurrently looking to join a game with other players (matchmaking) can be quite large, often on the order of hundreds of players. Consequently, taking this many latency measurements can substantially increase network traffic, to a point where the network traffic adversely and unrealistically affects the latency measurement, especially on lower bandwidth connections. As a result, there has heretofore been no adequate way in which to measure latency in peer-to-peer computing environments.